To wait or to respond?
Organisms choose to respond or wait based on payoff rates, not an innate bias to act.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran three lab tests with pigeons and people. Each test gave two options: press now or wait a bit.
The payoff for pressing and for waiting stayed equal. The only thing that changed was how soon each payoff came.
What they found
When waiting paid just as much, birds and humans waited. They did not show a built-in drive to hit keys.
Choice flipped as soon as the timing of payoffs changed. Motivation, not species, set the pattern.
How this fits with other research
Meyer et al. (1987) saw the same flip. They used chance instead of equal pay. Low chance made subjects lock in early; high chance made them wait.
Vaughan (1985) said pigeons care more about delay than odds. Ringen (1993) agrees delay matters, but shows the rule is payoff rate, not delay itself.
Cerutti et al. (2004) later tracked wait times second-by-second. They found lags that Ringen (1993) did not measure, extending the story.
Why it matters
Your client’s "impulsive" hit may not be impulsive at all. It may be the best rate the current schedule gives. Before you add a delay prompt, check if waiting actually pays more. If it does, teach the wait; if it doesn’t, raise the payoff for waiting first.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Emitting a certain response and waiting for a specified time without making that response had the same consequence. In Experiment 1, food-deprived pigeons were as likely to wait as to respond only if waiting provided food at a much higher frequency than did pecking. In Experiment 2, the consequence for humans was a brief light flash and tone. People were not biased for responding over waiting. Instead, their choices suggested crude payoff maximization. In Experiment 3, pigeons again obtained food, but they were not food deprived and could eat freely at each opportunity. Their behavior was more like that of the humans of Experiment 2 than that of food-deprived pigeons given small quantities of food at each feeding opportunity. The three experiments together showed that biases for responding over waiting were neither inherent characteristics of species nor inevitable outcomes of particular schedules. Choice between active search and waiting depended on ecological-motivational factors even when species and schedules were held constant.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1993 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1993.59-433